Collaboration applications and environments allow session participants that may be remote from each other to interact online in a variety of ways or exchange a variety of communications. For instance, collaboration participants may engage in video exchanges, voice calls, instant messaging, white board presentations, and desktop views, or any combination or variation thereof. Microsoft® Lync® is an example application program suitable for providing such collaboration environments.
As the feasibility of collaborating online has increased, so too have the technologies with which collaboration environments can be delivered. For example, collaboration participants may engage in a video conference, voice call, or instant messaging session using traditional desktop or laptop computers, as well as tablets, mobile phones, gaming systems, dedicated collaboration systems, or any other suitable communication device. Different architectures can be employed to deliver collaboration environments including centrally managed and peer-to-peer architectures.
Many collaboration environments allow for emphasizing the presentation of some communications relative to others. In an example scenario involving multiple speakers in a video conference, video associated with the person presently speaking may be visually emphasized over vide of other participants, and may in fact may occur automatically. In addition to these aspects, many environments allow visual preferences and emphasis to be set manually. For example, a user may designate video from one remote scene to be emphasized within an environment over video sourced from another remote scene.